Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Understanding Fake News

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April 20, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

15:19

Understanding Fake News

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	Hey everybody, my name is Tim Poole and I'm a journalist and I am guest hosting a video here on Sargon's channel.
	I'm going to be talking about how the mainstream media works, fake news and propaganda.
	The first thing I want to do is introduce myself so you get an idea of how I know how these things work.
	So about six years ago I started producing news entirely on my own for social media.
	My work attracted the attention of a ton of large mainstream news outlets and I received a lot of accolades and some awards for my work.
	I was featured in Time Magazine's Person of the Year activist edition.
	I was also nominated as a Time 100 personality for my work, as well as a ton of other features in magazines and television.
	I did all this for about a year and a half before joining Vice Media where I was the first member of Vice News and one of the key founding members of the organization.
	I was there for about a year and a half as well before joining Fusion, an ABC Univision joint venture, where last August my contract ended and I left to work entirely independently once again for many reasons.
	But since then I've been producing almost exclusively on my personal social platforms.
	The first thing that I want to talk about is fake news and what it is, how it works.
	I understand many of you probably know a lot of this, but for the sake of explaining where this leads to, I'm going to start with the basics.
	The first kind of fake news we should talk about is literal fake news made up by someone in their living room.
	There are many small blogs and new websites where users have realized that they can just write whatever they want as crazy as possible because people are going to share it and they're going to make money.
	Stories like Hillary Clinton kills FBI agent.
	It targets a certain group of people, it gets shares, and some of these people are making $20,000 or more per month just making things up.
	The next kind of fake news we have is hyper-partisan, ignorant reporting.
	This is well-intentioned.
	There are people who think they understand what they're talking about.
	They'll create their own alternative media website, but they don't know the whole picture.
	So while they're trying to provide what they think is an honest depiction, they're missing a lot of what's actually going on.
	And again, it is well-intentioned.
	And this brings me to the next kind of fake news, hyper-partisan content that purposefully omits one side of the story.
	This tends to be news organizations that are well-funded.
	And it's important to know that they're not technically doing this on purpose either.
	It is also well-intentioned.
	But many of these companies will hire people with a specific political leaning so that they report issues that reflect what the company wants.
	I'll give you one really great example.
	I was in Janesville, Wisconsin during a Trump rally where a specific incident happened.
	The left reported that a 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted and then pepper sprayed.
	The right tended to report that an elderly man was punched in the face.
	But the truth is, both were one incident.
	A woman whose age we don't necessarily know, maybe 15 or 19, punched an old man in the face and then got pepper sprayed for it.
	But you can see that one group being left will only focus on one issue and one group being right only focuses on the other issue.
	Quite honestly, it admits the most important part of what you should know about how these conflicts start, and it will alter your perception of reality.
	So this brings me to institutional news, the mainstream media, and why we're seeing such bad reporting.
	The first thing we'll talk about here is propaganda.
	Again, it's important to know that many of these journalists are not purposefully trying to mislead you.
	Even the editors, the supervising editors, and the editor-in-chief may think they're producing real information that will benefit you.
	But most of these companies will hire people specifically to report an ideology they know these people already hold.
	The point of this is money.
	It's really not that complicated.
	Companies know that if they want to make money, they need to capture a market.
	At the dawn of the internet, we started seeing a huge diversification of how media works.
	News organizations used to be very few, and they needed to be moderate because if they pushed too far in one direction, they would risk losing a large portion of their market share.
	So they tried very hard to be balanced.
	We saw the rise in the 90s of Fox News, later MSNBC, where cable news started to become partisan because these people, these business people, knew they could still make money targeting single demographics.
	When the internet then started, people had the choice to read a story from any of the tens of thousands and today probably millions of websites that will push a narrative.
	And because people are looking for news that they're interested in, and they're also more likely to click a story that fills their bias, they're going to read partisan news, unfortunately.
	YouTube, for example, is great.
	Liberals don't tend to search for news topics that have to do with the economy, refugees, or foreign policy.
	They tend to search for social issues, and people who are more conservative tend to be searching for the aforementioned topics.
	With the ability to then search for whatever they want, it becomes increasingly difficult for news organizations to be correct.
	People can easily fact-check anything written by a journalist and oftentimes find that many of these stories are not entirely true or they omit certain information simply because of the journalist's own bias or because a journalist thinks certain parts of the story aren't important enough to include.
	If they're making a video, they might be short for time or an article might go too long and they have to cut out words.
	What I saw with a lot of these companies, and not just the ones I worked at, is that marketers and consultants would tell them, young people tend to be liberal, therefore, you need to produce content that reflects the views of the young people.
	So they would purposefully hire people who held these views because they knew they would produce this content without prompt.
	So again, it's just about making money.
	These companies want to build influence because influence can direct viewers to advertisements and that's how they make their money.
	And there's other things like subscription models where they believe that if they can convince you to subscribe, they'll make money as well, in which case all of the same standards still apply.
	So here's the big question.
	What is a journalist?
	Before we describe what a journalist is, there's a concept that I want to share with you.
	Think about something you're very passionate about, something that you know a lot about.
	Maybe it's gaming, maybe specifically it's Hearthstone or something else.
	A journalist probably doesn't play that game, doesn't play any of these games, but they're tasked to go, interview some subjects, and report on the issue.
	You eventually see their story, you read through it and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, this story is totally wrong.
	They were way off.
	I know way more than they do.
	People are going to read this story and get the wrong idea about what's going on in my community.
	But then you read the next story, something about war or something about tennis, something you're not an expert in.
	And you think to yourself, oh wow, that's interesting.
	I never knew that.
	When we see a story in which we are an expert, we can easily point out the flaws in the reporting.
	But when we see news stories that talk about a field we know nothing about, we just assume it's true.
	And people tend to do this.
	Everyone tends to do this.
	The reality is, these journalists writing the stories aren't members of most of these communities.
	And so they rely on quotes from experts to fit their stories.
	And if there's an expert that you know to be wrong, or you don't trust the person they're talking to, you're going to see their story as factually incorrect or outright fake news.
	So what is a journalist?
	Quite honestly, I don't know.
	School doesn't make you a journalist.
	I'm a high school dropout.
	I went to high school for a couple months, tried college for a couple months, didn't do any of it.
	I never took a class in journalism.
	I don't even know what, how you define a journalist.
	Maybe it's just somebody who commits an act of journalism in which anyone can just decide to become a journalist if they decide to report.
	But what I will say is that what I do is I travel to various locations, I try to witness these events and talk to as many people as possible to better understand what's happening on the ground.
	To me, that's at least an idea of what journalism should be.
	But we're facing a really big problem today with a concept called churnalism.
	That's C-H-U-R-N, not journalism.
	Chournalism is the process by which many of these new media organizations will hire young people at really bad salaries, have them come in, read Reddit or CNN, and then rewrite those stories.
	Maybe they see a story on Twitter, they click it, they rewrite it, they add a little spin to it.
	Maybe it's left-wing, maybe it's right-wing.
	This is the majority of the news we're seeing today.
	What ends up happening, in many instances, we see a strange game of telephone, where stories from years ago, even fake news and prank stories, become long-standing facts.
	A story could persist for years because of chournalism.
	People will see it, they'll rewrite it, wait a week, and then post it.
	Then another chournalist will see it, rewrite it, and as they constantly add their spin to it, the story evolves into something totally strange.
	In one specific example, one of the companies that I worked at produced a story that was over six months old and debunked because they never followed up on the story from six months ago.
	They had just heard about it today and decided to write it.
	Sure enough, many people saw that story too and assumed it was new and didn't even Google search it to find out it was a six-month-old story that was debunked.
	There's a huge problem.
	With all of the new blogs, alternative media websites, and the rise of digital media, news companies can't afford to hire real journalists anymore.
	And they can't afford to pay expensive salaries.
	Let's look at the logic of what would happen if you went to an investor and said, I've got a proposal for you.
	I want to hire two researchers at $70,000 per year.
	I need a budget of $200,000 for video production and a staff to produce a documentary.
	And we are going to investigate this corporation and this government official.
	The investor is going to look at you and say, how long will this take?
	You respond, maybe one year.
	The investor will then say, what do I get after one year?
	Well, journalists can't guarantee a story.
	That's not what journalism does.
	They can promise to investigate.
	They can promise to spend the money, but there's no guarantee that the product after one year will be valuable.
	Most investors are going to look you in the face and say, no, I'd rather just put it in the bank and collect a small interest rate.
	But what happens when someone goes to an investor and says, I'm going to do a story, I need $5,000?
	The investor says, what do I get after a year?
	The person responds, I'll tell you what, after three days, I'll say whatever you want me to say.
	We'll produce a video and just say it's true.
	How about that?
	This is one of the big problems we're seeing in news.
	It is not economically feasible for people to invest in real reporting.
	So we're looking at subscriber models, we're looking at pay what you will, and we're looking at nonprofits to carry out real reporting.
	In fact, some of the largest news organizations have totally dissolved their investigative news teams over the past few years.
	Many others are outsourcing this.
	After a few years of watching this machine churn, I started to ask myself, why was it that so many of these new digital startups were hyper-partisan?
	The old ones, like I said before, are being told by consultants.
	But the new ones, not so much.
	And it's not just about hyper-partisan politics.
	It's also about how many of these new media startups don't believe in objective journalism.
	And they flat out say it.
	The truth is, it's not that these people are being directed to produce partisan content, but it's that the content that works online is hyper-partisan.
	And that means young people who fit the mold, who believe in producing partisan content to play to one side or the other are going to get clicks.
	They're going to generate ad revenue.
	They're going to attract investors.
	And the biggest digital media startups are going to inherently be one side or the other.
	And this is bad for everybody because now we're seeing violence in the streets.
	We're seeing insane rhetoric between the left and the right.
	And the problems, in my opinion, are only going to get worse.
	My advice to you is to read, watch, listen to everything you can.
	Read some pro-Trump content, read some pro-feminist content.
	I'm not saying to agree with any of it.
	And by all means, consider whatever you want to be wrong.
	You're allowed to have an opinion.
	But the worst case scenario from reading news organizations you don't agree with is that you'll at least understand what they believe and why they believe it.
	And you'll be better equipped for an argument or debate if it ever ends up happening.
	You'll just be better informed.
	Now here's what I was saving just for the end.
	Many people have asked me, have I ever been directed to produce content to fit a political ideology?
	And the answer is yes, okay, by the higher-ups of very large companies.
	And I was told that we are tasked with siding with the audience.
	Unfortunately, I've found that it's no longer the role of media to challenge preconceptions, to challenge the narrative.
	It's the goal of media to find people who will click the link more than anyone else so they can make money.
	They can get shares, they can get investment, and they can sleep well at night.
	My personal take on all of this, everything we've seen in media, the attacks, the mainstream media attacking new media, attacking social media, large outlets that just don't like independent producers who can do whatever they want.
	We are heading down a path of partisanship that is becoming more and more extreme, and it's just going to continue getting worse.
	And honestly, I fear the worst.
	I don't know what to expect.
	I don't know what will happen.
	But I've seen the violence in the streets.
	So look, there are a million more things that I can say about this, but this was the most concise version I could give you.
	I could seriously have a seven-hour conversation talking about the inner workings of these big media corporations.
	And it's because of the things I have seen that I have decided I would be better off making less money, but producing independent content on YouTube, on Twitter, on live stream.
	You don't have to trust me, but at least you'll know the content I produce isn't coming at the behest of a corporation or government.
	No one tells me what I can and can't report on, and no one tells me what to say.
	It's the only real benefit you get.
	So by all means, if you're familiar with my content and you don't like it, I absolutely welcome you to dislike my content.
	But at least watch it.
	So then you can know what some people are thinking about some things that are happening in the world.
	Thank you all so much for hanging out.
	You can find me on Twitter at Timcast.
	My YouTube channel is youtube.com slash Timcast.
	Special thanks to Sargon for letting me host this video on his channel.
	I really appreciate everyone who took the time to hear what I had to say.
	And maybe I will see you around if you check out my channel.

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